Beyond the Second Sophistic. Tim Whitmarsh
Longus’s faux-naïf Daphnis and Chloe (second–third century C.E.) is dressed in the garb of a local myth, as told to the narrator by the exegete of a Lesbian cult of the Nymphs.
There is also a recurrent linkage between erotic narrative and local history: sexual union seems often to betoken some kind of foundational event.49 Consequently, a number of texts emerged that used this form as a cover for scurrillity and titillation. The most notorious example is the Milesian Events (Milēsiaka) of Aristides: “lascivious books,” according to Plutarch (Crass. 32.3).50 Ovid refers to Aristides in the same breath as one Eubius, “the author of an impure history” “who recently wrote a Sybaritic Events” (Tristia 2.413–16). The Suda also attests to such works. Philip of Amphipolis (of unknown date) composed Coan Events, Thasian Events, and Rhodian Events, the last of which is styled “totally disgraceful” (Suda, s.v. “Philip of Amphipolis”; see also Theodorus Priscianus, Eupor. 133.5–12).
Late-Hellenistic prose collections of local narratives (by Nicander, Parthenius, Conon, and others)51 point to the fact that they were increasingly perceived to have intrinsic narrative interest, independent of their original (or supposedly original) function in local ideology. Such collections are often united by narrative theme: Parthenius gathers love stories (like the pseudo-Plutarchan assemblage, which is probably later in date), and other later examples include the collection of metamorphosis stories of Antoninus Liberalis. What this suggests is that local histories came to be viewed as repositories for arresting and alluring narrative, independent of their political, cultural, or religious value to their communities. Parthenius, indeed, dedicates his collection to his patron Cornelius Gallus for use in his (Latin) hexameters and elegiacs.
Local history is not “fictional” in the same way as the imperial romance.52 Its subject matter veers from obscure mythology to central mythology to recent history, with plenty of indeterminate areas between. It is not, however, plasmatic, like the novel or New Comedy: the stories are never presented as wholly invented. Indeed, the function of the manchettes that accompany many of Parthenius’s narratives is precisely to identify the sources of the stories. For these reasons, it is misleading to present local history as a genetic predecessor of the imperial romance.53 To grasp the fictionality of local history, we need to resist, once again, conceptions of fiction that are shaped by the imperial period.
Greek and Near Eastern Narratives
The forms of local history and mythology emerging into view during this period were not just Greek.54 We have already discussed the multiple versions of the story of the Syrian Semiramis and the Assyrian Ninus, which (for Greeks at least) stemmed ultimately from Ctesias. As the doctor of Artaxerxes II, Ctesias is likely to have had access to Persian narratives, perhaps even the “royal parchments” of which he makes mention,55 and he may well have spoken the language. Similarly culturally bifocal was Xenophon, whose experiences with the mercenary army of ten thousand who fought to support Cyrus—in his rebellion against Ctesias’s patron Artaxerxes—will have brought him into contact with different traditions. Xenophon’s most “novelistic” work was the Cyropaedia, an idealized biography of the king who united the Persians and Medes. Interwoven with the central section is a subnarrative dealing with the constant, enduring love between Panthea and Abradatas, before the latter is tragically killed in battle (4.6.11–12, 5.1.2–18, 6.1.31–51, 6.3.35–6.4.11, 7.1.15, 7.1.24–32, 7.1.46–49, 7.3.2–16). Critics have rightly emphasized the influence of this episode on the imperial romance, particularly on the Persian episodes of Chariton’s Callirhoe.56 We also have a report in Philostratus (third century C.E.) of a work called Araspes in Love with Panthea (Araspes being a suitor of the Xenophontic Panthea), which (so says Philostratus) some attribute to Dionysius of Miletus but is in fact the work of a certain Celer (Lives of the Sophists 524). Whether this was a “novel” (as modern critics mostly assume) or (more likely, in my view) a rhetorical declamation, it shows the iconic significance of the Panthea sequence in amatory literary history. We also read of a now-lost Pantheia the Babylonian by Soterichus of Oasis (writing under Diocletian), which was quite probably a romance (FGrH 641).
Indeed, erotic prose seems to have been associated with Eastern storytelling from the very beginning. Herodotus’s Histories begins with the intriguing assertion that Persian logioi—the term seems to mean something like “prose chroniclers” (see Nagy 1987)—tell the story of the Trojan War as an escalation in tit-for-tat woman stealing after the Phoenician abduction of Io (1.1–4). The Phoenicians’ version, Herodotus proceeds to tell us, is different: Io left willingly, having fallen pregnant by the captain of a Phoenician ship (1.5). Whether Herodotus is accurately reporting Persian and Phoenician traditions is simply unknowable: it is possible, but it is equally possible that this represents an Orientalist mirage. The central point for our purposes, however, is that he is presenting himself as someone with access to Persian and north-Semitic cultural traditions—and also, crucially, that these traditions are preserved in a form alien to the Greek generic taxonomy, as “realist” (i.e., nonmythological) erotic prose.
The allure of glamorous Oriental eroticism remains evident throughout the Hellenistic period. The Ninus and Semiramis story was undoubtedly the most popular “Orientalist” narrative, but we can identify others. Particularly notable is the association between (particularly erotic) prose fiction and Semitic culture. One striking example is the complex of narratives around Stratonice, the wife of Alexander’s successor Seleucus, and her stepson Antiochus (later to be Antiochus I): according to the story, he fell in love with her and began wasting away; the doctor Erasistratus diagnosed the problem, and then Seleucus ceded to him not only Stratonice but also his kingdom.57 Despite the historical characters, the main theme of the story is clearly folkloric: an inversion of the motif of the lusty older woman and the virtuous younger man, familiar from the Greek Hippolytus myth and the Hebrew story of Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39). Lucian’s version strongly underlines the Semitic overtones of the story, segueing into an etiology of the cult of the Syrian goddess Atargatis at Hierapolis.58 It looks very much as though the historical story has been blended with a Syrian myth in order to explain the distinctive nature of the Hierapolitan cult.
This interpenetration of Greek and Semitic erotic narrative is paralleled elsewhere. A certain Laetus composed a Phoenician Events, including accounts of the abduction of Europa and Eiramus’s (Hiram’s) presentation to Solomon of his daughter (together with an amount of wood—presumably Lebanese cedar—for shipbuilding; FGrH 784 F 1[b]). The latter story was also told by Menander of Ephesus, who was widely held (no doubt on his own testimony) to have learned Phoenician to access his sources (FGrH 783 T3[a]–[c]). According to the Suda, Xenophon of Cyprus (undatable but probably Hellenistic and perhaps Ovid’s source for the relevant stories in the Metamorphoses) composed a Cypriot Events, glossed as “a history of erotic plots” including the stories of Cinyra, Myrrha, and Adonis. All of these figures are Semitic in origin and no doubt reflect Cyprus’s partially Phoenician heritage. We can point also to the Nachleben of the Phoenician setting in the imperial romance, in Lollianus’s Phoenician Events, and in Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon.
Another erotic story that may have a Semitic source is the notorious love between the children of Miletus, either of Caunus for his sister Byblis or the reverse. The major Hellenistic versions are in the fragmentary works of the epic poets Apollonius of Rhodes and Nicaenetus59 and the prose mythographers Parthenius60 and Conon.61 The Semitic case62 is based partly on the incest motif (which superficially resembles that of the Cypro-Phoenician Myrrha narrative) and partly on the name Byblis, which looks like an eponym for the Phoenician city of Byblos. It is also possible that Caunus is an originally Phoenician name, given that Caria absorbed Phoenician influence. (Armand d’Angour points out to me, additionally, the Phoenician town known to the author of the biblical 1 Chronicles as KWN [18.8].) Again, a Semitic erotic myth seems to have entered the Greek tradition; as it has done so, its etiological aspects have been gradually pared away to emphasize the erotic narrative.
A different kind of Semitic narrative hove over the Greek horizon with the translation of the Septuagint: a number of the so-called Apocrypha have been claimed as “novels” (including Esther, Susanna, Judith, and Daniel—the Greek version of which is longer than the Hebrew, having taken on a